Avengers: "The Mighty Avengers Meet The Masters of Evil"

Avengers #6 (1964)

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Chic Stone

Background: The current roster of the Avengers is Thor, Iron Man, Giant Man, Wasp and Captain America, who has just joined the team.

So, What Happens? After his last mission with the Avengers, Captain America tests the new transistors Iron Man has built inside his shield, allowing it to always fly back to Cap's hands. Despite a bunch of fan letters from all over the world rejoicing his recent return among the living, Cap can't forget what happened to Bucky and vows to get revenge against the man who killed him. The villain in question is Baron Zemo, who has spent the last several decades in the South American jungle waiting for the creation of a solvent capable of removing the Adhesive X gluing his mask to his face. Reading that Captain America is alive, the Baron angrily remembers how it was the hero who made Adhesive X fall on his face and decides to form a group of villains to defeat the Avengers. He quickly enlists the Black Knight, the Melter and the Radioactive Men, who spray Adhesive X all over the city. The Avengers arrive and a battle begins, but soon Cap and Giant-Man get stuck to the road and the heroes need to fall back and regroup to find a way to free them. After a few failed attempts, the Wasp remembers about Paste-Pot Pete, an adhesive expert and former foe of the Human Torch, who indeed does have a super-dissolver that frees the two Avengers. With the help of the Teen Brigade, the Avengers replace the Adhesive with the dissolver, freeing the entire city, and have a rematch against the Masters, this time switching foes to take them by surprise. The Black Knight, Radioactive Man and Melter are quickly captured, leaving only Zemo for Captain America. Cap is a fury and Zemo is about to be defeated when one of his soldiers fires his gun and grazes the Avenger. Zemo looks about to escape with a can of super-dissolver, but Cap had replaced it with tear gas, so that the Baron loses control of his heli-overcraft and can be arrested by the police.


Notes: Cap will discard the transistors shortly after this story, saying their weight disrupts the delicate balance of the shield. Zemo will actually escape the police and be back next issue.

Something Silly This Way Comes: Iron Man opened the supposedly unbreakable shield of Captain America to fill it with transistors. Zemo has spent the last twenty years in the jungle waiting for someone to come up with a solvent for Adhesive X.

Review: I've said before that it took a long, long time for the Avengers to hit their stride, and this issue proves just how silly some early Silver Age stories of the team could be. Here we have a Nazi scientist who wanted to conquer the world with glue and spent 20 years in the jungle with a purple mask stuck on his face waiting for a solvent to be made instead of trying to create one himself. Say all you want about Stan Lee, but he certainly didn't lack imagination. With a premise such as this, the rest of the story can't be much better, so it's not surprising that within a few pages we have one of those scenes you need to see to believe: Cap and Giant-Man water-skiing behind a tow truck whilst their feet are glued to the pavement.

Still, it's not all bad and we get the first introduction of the Masters of Evil, possibly Marvel's best group of villains. Fighting a team of superheroes with a tailored team of supervillains is a common cliché, but one with the potential to at least produce some good fighting scenes. Unfortunately, while the fights here are indeed pretty good, with all the other shenanigans going on they only last a few pages and the Black Knight is even defeated off-panel. The Wasp also doesn't have much to do, and the fact that Zemo doesn't even bother to recruit someone specifically for her is telling of her importance in these early issues, but at least she is the one to come up with the idea of calling future Wizard Paste-Pot Pete, in a nice bit of continuity with the Human Torch solo stories. Pete is basically a joke, but asking him for help with a glue problem makes complete sense, and is far more logical than creating yet another new power for Thor's hammer.

As far as the villains are concerned, they all come across as one-dimensional, with no motivation besides basic revenge against the Avenger who had defeated them originally. Zemo is pretty spry for someone who served under Hitler in the war, but at this stage stories were still taking place in real time and WWII had only occurred about twenty years earlier, so it's possible he could have just kept in shape. What's more surprising is the unnecessary amount of space given to Zemo's pilot, but actually it's the entire last few pages that feel off, like Stan and Jack had realized there were still more pages to fill and needed to stretch things out a bit more at the last minute.

Speaking of Jack Kirby, this is definitely not one of his better issues. Despite a gorgeous splash page of the Black Knight and some very pretty close-ups, many poses look a little off, almost cartoonish, and the overall quality declines towards the end of the story. Chic Stone is usually a very good inker for Kirby, but here certain backgrounds are so essential that I suspect there was some time/deadline constrain that had a bad impact on the final work. In a 1997 interview Stone recalled

There were times I'd be working on three stories at once; working 12 to 16 hours a day was not unusual. The page rate for inking was not that great, but being able to work on Jack's pencils was a substantial bonus

so it's entirely possible this was one of those times.

Final Verdict: The introduction of Marvel's premiere group of villains and some nice action shots can't quite save an essentially silly story. 2/5